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Columbia: Space Shuttle Disaster (2008)
Written and directed by Gilles Cayette, Produced by Frank Eskenazi for Nova
Distributed by PBS
www.pbs.org
54 minutes
No flight that takes its crew from zero to Mach 24 in a matter of minutes can truly be called "routine," but STS-107 - the 107th mission of the space shuttle program, flown in late January 2003 - came close. Like dozens of shuttle missions before it, STS-107 was devoted entirely to science. As mission commander Rick Husband and pilot Willie McCool monitored Columbia's around-the-world in-90-minutes orbit, the other five members of the crew carried out eighty different experiments in the laboratory modules bolted into its payload bay. There would be no spacewalks, no docking with the International Space Station, and no need for the fifty-foot robot arm, which had been left behind to save weight. Even the chunks of insulating foam shed by the she external fuel tank at liftoff seemed (at the time) routine. Every shuttle flight had suffered "foam loss" at launch and returned to Earth with small dings and gouges in the tiles of its heat shield.
Sixteen minutes before its scheduled landing in Florida, as Columbia streaked through the Earth's atmosphere over New Mexico, things began to...